Alan S. Chartock: Driving while tired should be a crime

Have you been driving and gotten so tired that you resorted to opening the windows full tilt or blasting the radio or pinching yourself or slapping yourself in the face to stay awake?

If you haven't, you are exceptional.

Falling asleep at the wheel is one of the chief reasons why people get into accidents, causing injuries and death to themselves and others.

So how do you stop it? Some states have made driving while fatigued a criminal offense. People have been put on trial for vehicular homicide. As for me, when I am driving late at night I view each set of oncoming lights as a car driven by a potential killer.

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If we hold people who drive under the influence of alcohol of drugs responsible, why shouldn't fatigued drivers be held accountable when they cause an accident? We know that a lot of state legislators who make the rules on this stuff would probably be loath to vote in favor of such a law because, let's face it, they often drive while sleepy, racing home from a late night session in Albany. In fact, drunk driving is still not punished severely enough. Both driving while tired and driving drunk are cases for legislators of "There but for the grace of God go I."

The problem, of course, is that every once in a while something really horrendous happens. A driver with a group of people in a bus falls asleep and kills people in his charge. A truck driver cheats on the number of hours he is supposed to drive at a time and the results are catastrophic. I don't have to ask you how you might feel if your husband, wife or child were wiped out because someone fell asleep at the wheel.

But we can't make criminals out of all of us -- or can we? I know that I have come home from work in broad daylight and found myself falling asleep. It doesn't happen often but the last time it did, I pulled off the road to a safe place and slept for a half hour. I woke up feeling refreshed and resumed my journey. So we have to scare people straight and let them know, as we have with drunk driving, that they can go to prison if they are caught.

It's easy to give a drunk driver a sobriety test but how do you test for driving while tired? You can't pull someone over and test for being sleepy. The only way to do it is to hold people responsible, after the fact, for driving tired. I mean, if someone hits a tree, a trooper might expect that they feel asleep and just as certainly, someone will blame it on a malfunction of their car. On the other hand, many people, faced with dire personal consequences will not drive tired just as they have been trained not to drive after consuming alcohol. The way you do that is to arrest or heavily fine them and try them for falling asleep, especially if loss of life has occurred as a result of their actions.

Some states already have such laws and others will get them. It makes sense to me. We all know that after a lot of medical procedures, you are warned not to drive for 24 hours. You can bet that I don't. I know that if I were to get into an accident, I could wind up in terrible trouble.

It makes sense to train people not to drive while tired, just as we train them not to drive while impaired. So many of us guilty of this that this will be a tough law to get passed and yet it would certainly save lives.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC. His column appears Saturday.